She knows, she knows! She sings, she sings!

It might be the Catholic in me that thinks of spring as the start of a new year, or it could be that I usually find out in the spring what will happen in the coming academic year, so it feels like the start of something new, or it could be that a fair number of relationships have begun or ended in the spring. Yet while the start of something new, nothing makes me quite as nostalgic and overcome. Yes, Mez, it is springtime Katie. And these memories led me to read my old opendiary entries (and thought it was a good idea to share them with Andrew?). I've been working on the same  philosophical problems for nine years now. I wish I could have an organic food night to go along with it and that we could all frolic in MoBot for a while.

I posted this in OD on April 1, 2002, and I'm writing a paper on the topic again this semester:

Catch only what you've thrown yourself, all is
mere skill and little gain;
but when you're suddenly the catcher of a ball
thrown by an eternal partner
with accurate and measured swing
towards you, to your center, in an arch
from the great bridgebuilding of God:
what catching then becomes a power--
not yours, a world's.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, cited in the fronticepiece to Gadamer's Truth and Method


It's funny that only this time I realized the emphasis on world, rather than individual, play.

And this Rilke, from The Sonnets to Orpheus, I found for the first time yesterday:
XXI
Spring has returned. The earth resembles
a little girl who has memorized
many poems....For all the trouble
of her long learning, she wins the prize.

Her teacher was strict. We loved the white
in the old man's beard and shaggy eyebrows.
Now, whatever we ask about
the blue and the green, she knows, she knows!

Earth, overjoyed to be out on vacation,
play with the children. We long to catch up,
jubilant Earth. The happiest will win.

What her teacher taught her, the numberless Things,
and what lies hidden in stem and in deep
difficult root, she sings, she sings!

And this, which stings a bit:
VIII
You playmates of mine in the scattered parks of the city,
small friends from a childhood of long ago:
how we found and liked one another, hesitantly,
and, like the lamb with the talking scroll,

spoke with our silence. When we were filled with joy,
it belonged to no one: it was simply there.
And how it dissolved among all the adults who passed by
and in the fears of the endless year.

Wheels rolled past us, we stood and stared at the carriages;
houses surrounded us, solid but untrue--and none
of them ever knew us. What in that world was real?

Nothing. Only the balls. Their magnificent arches.
Not even the children... But sometimes one,
oh a vanishing one, stepped under the plummeting ball.